Arm Holdings

Arm Holdings is a British semiconductor design company that develops processor architectures and licenses them to chipmakers around the world, rather than manufacturing chips itself. Arm-based designs are used in the overwhelming majority of smartphones globally, and increasingly in laptops, servers and automotive electronics.^[1]

History

Arm's lineage traces to Acorn Computers' Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) processor of the mid-1980s, designed for the Archimedes home computer. In 1990 Acorn spun out its processor division as a joint venture with Apple and VLSI Technology, forming Advanced RISC Machines, later renamed Arm Holdings.^[2] The company built its business on the observation that a well-designed, power-efficient instruction set architecture could be licensed broadly and implemented by many manufacturers.

SoftBank Group acquired Arm in 2016 for approximately US$32 billion. In 2020 Nvidia agreed to buy the company for about US$40 billion, but the deal collapsed in February 2022 after sustained regulatory opposition in the United States, the European Union and China.^[4] SoftBank completed a buyout of Arm's remaining public shares in the same year, then relisted the company on Nasdaq in September 2023, in one of the largest technology IPOs of the year at a valuation of roughly US$54.5 billion.^[3] Arm's market capitalisation subsequently exceeded US$150 billion in 2025, powered by investor expectations for AI-related compute demand.

Arm has introduced successive architecture generations, with Arm v9 (2021) being the first major revision in a decade. Arm has reported that Arm v9 designs accounted for an increasingly large share of its new royalty revenue through 2024 and 2025.^[3] A 2018 sale of a 51% stake in Arm China to Chinese investors for about US$775 million also left Arm with an ongoing minority position in a separate entity that has been the subject of governance disputes.

Key Concepts and Technology

Arm's licensing model is the core of its business. Chipmakers pay upfront licence fees to access Arm's intellectual property and per-chip royalties when products ship — typically a small percentage of the chip's selling price — so Arm's revenue scales with global semiconductor production across many companies and markets.^[1]

The product families cover different market segments: Cortex-A cores for application processors (smartphones, laptops), Cortex-R for real-time and safety-critical uses such as automotive control, Cortex-M for low-power microcontrollers, Neoverse cores for servers and infrastructure, Immortalis and Mali for graphics, and Ethos neural processing units (NPUs) for on-device AI.^[1] Neoverse-based designs now appear in major data centre chips, including Amazon's Graviton server processors and Nvidia's Grace CPUs, illustrating how Arm has expanded beyond mobile.^[3]

Arm v9 adds features aimed at security and performance workloads, including SVE2 vector extensions for AI and HPC, pointer authentication, and realm management for confidential computing.^[2]

Applications and Impact

Roughly 99% of the world's smartphones use Arm-based processors, and Arm architectures also underpin products including tablets, laptops (such as Apple's M-series MacBooks and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs), automotive domain controllers, storage devices and billions of microcontrollers.^[1] The architecture's efficiency advantage — strong performance per watt — has made it a mainstream choice for AI inference at the edge and in the cloud.

>See Also

• Qualcomm
• RISC-V
• NVIDIA
• TSMC
• Penang Semiconductor and AI Ecosystem
• MDEC Malaysia